Montevideo.- Uruguay has surpassed three months of red-level public alert due to dropping temperatures, with nearly 350,000 instances of assistance provided in shelters and evacuation centers for the homeless.
According to data from the National Emergency System, on July 7th alone, 3,939 people were attended to across the country, while the cumulative total since the start of the alert has been 345,915 cases.
Of these, 293,811 cases were referred to Ministry of Social Development shelters and 52,104 to the various evacuation centers set up throughout the national territory to address this situation.
The Government of Uruguay declared a red alert on May 5th and two days later began the mandatory evacuation of homeless people.
That day, in a press conference, the Secretary of the Presidency of the Republic, Alejandro Sánchez, explained that they were going to proceed in a similar way to the one used in 2025.
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“Just as it was the previous year, we are beginning to work within the same framework where we will proceed with the mandatory evacuation of people experiencing homelessness. This will be deployed nationwide starting Thursday,” he explained.
Sánchez pointed out, then, that evacuation centers would be opened in two specific locations -one in the center of Montevideo and another on the outskirts of the capital- and that others would be added later.
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“The national police are going to be a very important part of this work together with the teams from the Ministry of Social Development when it comes to carrying out this decree,” Sánchez pointed out that day.
And he added: “People who are living out in the open, because their health is at risk and they also have a significant component of social vulnerability, we are going to gradually relocate them.”
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In 2025, Uruguay had already decreed a similar alert and the authorities proceeded to move homeless people to evacuation centers, even if they resisted, with the support of the Justice system.
According to data from the Uruguayan Institute of Meteorology, minimum temperatures in Montevideo for this week will be between five and twelve degrees Celsius with a low probability of rain.
